Sunday, December 5, 2010 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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Tularosa Basin from Second Bench, Dog Canyon Trail, Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, December 5, 2010
Take a hike
Today was a beautiful, warm, mostly sunny, day and I got a hankering to hike the 3 miles up to the line cabin on the Dog Canyon Trail. It's a nice hike and it's been a couple years since I was last up there and I wanted to make the hike before I head over to Leasburg Dam State Park, Radium Springs NM for a while.
So off I went.
That picture up there is looking back down canyon at the Tularosa Basin from the Second Bench about 2-/2 miles in and 1,500 feet up from the campground {I stuck a pin in my Night Camps map}. Phew - I'm not used to this!
Night camp
Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.